


Reflection

by 0zymandias



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 01:03:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19415254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/0zymandias/pseuds/0zymandias
Summary: Walt has spent months in a remote cabin, contemplating every mistake he’s made along the way. He grows weary, even though he’s hidden from the world and the consequences of his actions. Escape has only led him to an isolated purgatory of his very own mind. Tired and defeated, Heisenberg is effectively dead. Walt must ultimately ask himself, “What would Heisenberg do?”.





	Reflection

His pale, numbing fingers twirl America’s most wanted pork pie hat. He scoffs. It’s cold inside and out, so like it’s clockwork, again he watches his breath condense into cloud and dissipate into nothing. He thinks that it may be the only remaining indicator that Walter White is still alive.

Who is Walter White?

Still holding the hat, he stares a second at the brim. It was his muse, his persona. It gave him purpose because it gave him power. It changed him completely. Of course it wasn’t the hat. He’s sitting in a dingy cabin, god knows where, god knows how long, because he had run a meth empire and lost it all in the blink of an eye. Yet he was still doing it. Avoiding responsibility. The hat had only served to justify his mania, and he found himself wishing it really could contain all his sins. It felt like it may have at one point. Donning it had opened his own personal Pandora's box and released the monster that had guided Walt, and come back with Heisenberg.  
What had it done? How had it turned a stereotypical suburban father who had never really stepped outside of his comfort zone, into one of the most dangerous drug kingpins in the world? He didn’t feel so dangerous anymore. The hat had gone silent and he was an aging, frail man with the world after him. He lets the hat slip to the floor.  
These questions have become rhetorical to him. He’s long past accepting he had all but detonated the bomb which had left his life in tatters. The hat had played games with his ego, seduced it with delusions of grandeur and escape from the inadequacy that dying a high school chemistry teacher would have left him.  
The world had owed him. It had dammit. He’d laid the foundation for the billions of wealth that Gray Matter Technologies had generated, yet he’d ended up powerless as an underappreciated educator. He’d been denied the place in life he believed he’d been owed, and when he’d finally lost the fear of dying, as he found out how quickly he himself was, he’d gone back to audit his fair share of things.  
Walter smirks. He’d done alright. Eighty million over three years wasn’t too bad. He had been a man who could snap his fingers and make someone disappear. He’d been Ozymandias, King of Kings. Destined to fall. The high had reinvigorated the purpose Walt had lost somewhere along the way. It was too bad the comedown had cost him everything. Everything that goes up...he thinks. 

His empire had been built around addiction, and he, always the professor, had introduced to the world the very best cure to anxieties and sadness he could cook up. The best that ANYONE could cook up. Teachers tend to learn a few things from their students, and Walt had learned too. He’d learned how to provide. For his family, and for the legion of crippled souls that had supported his operation. Walt supposes he had once been like them, though he’d climbed out of hopelessness and built an empire from nothing but his own wit and intuition. Walt supposes he’s now more like them than ever before. Even as his name dominates headlines worldwide, Walter White is the epitome of washed up. He chuckles under his breath, summoning such little effort that it just sounds like he’s clearing his throat.  
Here sat the great Heisenberg. Helpless and losing hope. Lost also is his fortune, to the same people that’d killed…  
Stop. This was a common pitfall Walt tried to avoid. Thinking about the past wouldn’t change the future, but no matter what barriers he placed, it still haunted him. Everything he’d caused to the people he loved. Walt didn’t want to admit the similarities between him and his clientele, but they had a lot in common. Walt had found his high in power, in pride. He’d chased it to the very end and let it consume him along the way. He’d left everyone around him in the destruction in his wake. 

He’d followed a rabbit down a hole and entered a world of madness, but he’d been here before. Never quite this low, given his life was now forfeit to the entire country and not just Gus. Yet despite impossible odds he’d always had a solution to every new problem his actions cost him. This was the exception.  
Time and time again he’d plotted and mentally crossed out every solution he could possibly think of, but he was too trapped. He could leave his cabin and walk right down the mountainside if he so pleased, but notoriety is a hell of a prison.  
Walt couldn’t risk leaving with the heat he had on his tail. He couldn’t make contact with anybody. He’d long ago lost fear of death, but this was something worse. A broken family and a tarnished legacy, bodies piled up behind every step Walt had taken. No, death would have been too good for him. He’d said it himself, if there was such a thing, he’d be going to hell. This little purgatory of his had trapped him and forced him to relive every piece he’d precariously stacked, every one of which had been toppled. Skylar, Holly, Walter Jr., they were all gone. At this rate, his time would run out before he could ever dream of seeing any of them again. Not to mention Jesse, and whatever horrible fate he’d met. If Walt had been playing chess, he’d lost all his pieces.

Checkmate.

He looks out the window and watches the snow cover all evidence of life. He’d done similar things. To be honest with himself, it’d been a long time since those things had bothered him. He missed what he’d lost, not what he’d taken.  
Walt watches another breath take shape in front of him and vanish. Like every breath before it, it balloons before breaking apart. Walt knows the pattern like he’s lived it, like he’s re-lived every second in his head on a daily basis and can’t change the channel.  
That particular pattern should have been as easy to predict as the one in front of him. It should have been simple chemistry. Molecular reactions. Cause and effect. Chemistry revolves around figuring out solutions, predicting outcomes. Apparently, being an expert in the field hadn’t translated into actual foresight. If Walt had been at home with his son, he might’ve joked that he’d followed the Walter cycle. Thinking of the last words he’d heard from his son, he finds it a lot less funny. He takes a deep breath and exhales. 

Clockwork.

Christ. Walt thinks of twitching clock hands propelled by the rotating gears behind them. Ticking. He thinks of twitching fingers as he coerces Jesse into gunning down Gale.  
He knows now that Mike had been right. Walt had been a ticking time bomb, bringing everyone around him into radius of his explosion. His time was up.

Yet he was still breathing. He was still alive. Breath after breath, the ticking hadn’t stopped. 

He thought of Holly again. There was never a moment he didn’t, but he’d never missed her more than now. His beautiful little girl...She should have been his real legacy. He wanted to provide for her and his son, turn his sins into their security. It was an impossible task at this point. He had a fraction of his money and a target on his back everywhere that wasn’t this cabin. 

Every ticking time bomb has its use though.

It didn’t matter anymore. His life was over whether he liked it or not. He could sit here and shrivel away, or he could provide. Maybe even make amends.  
Walt could pay Lydia a short visit. Tie up loose ends. Maybe even put a few holes in the guys who’d taken his money. Who’d taken Jesse. 

Walt found himself sitting in the same place he had three years ago. Death was his best case scenario and the only scenario. Sick and withering away, knowing it, and embracing it, Walter White resolved to leave safety and take control. Once again, he stared death in the eyes and held fate back by the neck. 

Not yet.

Walt picks the hat off the floor, brushing off dust where it’d collected all this time. He holds it like a crown, using both hands to slowly lower it unto his head. Heisenberg isn’t done. He’ll be a guardian angel, ensure his family is provided for. He would elude death just a little longer, cast his ego aside and tie up loose ends. Make the best of his many mistakes. 

And he would see Holly. At least one last time.


End file.
